Houlun glanced around the hall for any stray ears. “Ruk nests have been pillaged. Eggs stolen in the night, hatchlings vanishing.”

Sartaq swore, filthy and low. Nesryn blinked at it, even as her stomach tightened. “Poachers have not dared tread in these mountains for decades,” the prince said. “But you should not have pursued them alone, Ej.”

“It was not poachers I sought. But something worse.”

Shadows lined the woman’s face, and Nesryn swallowed. If the Valg had come here—

“My own ej called them the kharankui.”

“It means shadow—darkness,” Sartaq murmured to Nesryn, dread tightening his face.

Her heart thundered. Should the Valg be here already—

“But in your lands,” Houlun went on, glancing between Nesryn and Falkan, “they call them something different, don’t they?”

Nesryn sized up Falkan as he swallowed, wondering herself how to lie or deflect revealing anything about the Valg—

But Falkan nodded. And he replied, voice barely audible above the flame, “We call them the stygian spiders.”

31

“The stygian spiders are little more than myths,” Nesryn managed to say to Houlun. “Spidersilk is so rare some even doubt it exists. You might be chasing ghosts.”

But it was Falkan who replied with a grim smile, “I would beg to differ, Captain Faliq.” He reached into the breast of his jacket, and Nesryn tensed, hand shooting for the dagger at her waist—

It was no weapon he pulled out.

The white fabric glittered, the iridescence like starfire as Falkan shifted it in his hand. Even Sartaq whistled at the handkerchief-sized piece of cloth.

“Spidersilk,” Falkan said, tucking the piece back into his jacket. “Straight from the source.”

As Nesryn’s mouth popped open, Sartaq said, “You have seen these terrors up close.” Not quite a question.

“I bartered with their kin in the northern continent,” Falkan corrected, that grim smile remaining. Along with shadows. So many shadows. “Nearly three years ago. Some might deem it a fool’s bargain, but I walked away with a hundred yards of Spidersilk.”

The handkerchief in his jacket alone could fetch a king’s ransom. A hundred yards of it …“You must be wealthy as the khagan,” she blurted.

A shrug. “I have learned that true wealth is not all glittering gold and jewels.”

Sartaq asked quietly, “What was the cost, then?” For the stygian spiders traded not in material goods, but dreams and wishes and—

“Twenty years. Twenty years of my life. Taken not from the end, but the prime.”

Nesryn scanned the man, his face just beginning to show the signs of age, the hair still without gray—

“I am twenty-seven,” Falkan said to her. “And yet I now appear to be a man of nearly fifty.”

Holy gods. “What are you doing at the aerie, then?” Nesryn demanded. “Do the spiders here produce the silk, too?”

“They are not so civilized as their sisters in the north,” Houlun said, clicking her tongue. “The kharankui do not create—only destroy. Long have they dwelled in their caves and passes of the Dagul Fells, in the far south of these mountains. And long have we maintained a respectful distance.”

“Why do you think they now come to steal our eggs?” Sartaq glanced to the few ruks lingering at the cave mouth, waiting for their riders. He leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his thighs.

“Who else?” the hearth-mother countered. “No poachers have been spotted. Who else might sneak upon a ruk’s nest, so high in the world? I flew over their domain these past few days. The webs indeed have grown from the peaks and passes of the Fells down to the pine forests in the ravines, choking off all life.” A glance toward Falkan. “I do not believe it mere coincidence that the kharankui have again begun preying upon the world at the same time a merchant seeks out our aerie for answers regarding their northern kin.”

Falkan raised his hands at Sartaq’s sharp look. “I have not sought them out nor provoked them. I heard whispers of your hearth-mother’s trove of knowledge and thought to seek her counsel before I dared anything.”

“What do you want with them?” Nesryn asked, angling her head.

Falkan examined his hands, flexing the fingers as if they were stiff. “I want my youth back.”

Houlun said to Sartaq, “He sold his hundred yards but still thinks he can reclaim the time.”

“I can reclaim it,” Falkan insisted, earning a warning glare from Houlun at his tone. He checked himself, and clarified, “There are … things that I still have left to do. I should like to accomplish them before old age interferes. I was told that slaying the spider who ate my twenty years was the only way to return those lost years to me.”

Nesryn’s brows narrowed. “Why not go hunt that spider back home, then? Why come here?”

Falkan didn’t answer.

Houlun said, “Because he was also told that only a great warrior can slay a kharankui. The greatest in the land. He heard of our close proximity to the terrors and thought to try his luck here first—to learn what we know about the spiders; perhaps how to kill them.” A faintly bemused look. “Perhaps also to find some backdoor way of reclaiming his years, an alternate route here, to spare him the confrontation there.”

A sound enough plan for a man insane enough to barter away his life in the first place.

“What does any of this have to do with the stolen eggs and hatchlings, Ej?” Sartaq, too, apparently possessed little sympathy for the merchant who’d traded his youth for kingly wealth. Falkan turned his face toward the fire, as if well aware of that.

“I want you to find them,” Houlun said.

“They have likely already died, Ej.”

“Those horrors can keep their prey alive long enough in their cocoons. But you are right—they have likely already been consumed.” Rage flickered in the woman’s face, a vision of the warrior beneath; the warrior her granddaughter was becoming as well. “Which is why I want you to find them the next time it happens. And remind those unholy piles of filth that we do not take kindly to theft of our young.” She jerked her chin to Falkan. “When they go, you will go, too. See if the answers you seek are there.”